Sorry if this has been done before... but what are cool gameplay ideas? I haven't played Sims 1 much... I started with Sims 2, but a few years ago I got Sims 1 and all expansions, minus House Party. I was in love for a week until the games would uninstall themselves and every time I wanted to play I had to reinstall them. I got so annoyed I stopped. I remember my family was just a girl who wanted to be famous so she always was in Studio Town. I'm about to reinstall them all in order (I installed them out of order which is why that happened) and make a really cool new family. But what family should I do to guarantee a long time of fun?

I think we've generated a list a couple of times. I found one thread that I'll link at the bottom of this post that might get you started. Personally, I find it more fun to play with various families than to just stick with one. With this game, it can also be fun to design an entire thematic neighborhood or two (think historical or cultural). I've had medieval and primitive neighborhoods in the past, for example. It's also so much more fun to try out the various architectural styles with different families (adobe, classic, New Orleans, Mediterranean, futuristic). And the premades can be a lot of fun - especially the Goths and the Mashugas!

Here's the thread with lots of ideas: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=485046

I learned rotational play in Sims1. It is so much easier to maintain friendships if you play both sides of them! And for rotational play you need variety in your families and houses. I had one neighborhood where I started with all single adults, but each single adult had a different kind of old building to renovate into their residence - an old one-room schoolhouse, an old church, an abandoned fish factory, an office building. In another neighborhood I'd start with different family configurations: a lesbian couple with a child from each mother, a single woman with a cat, an orphanage with two adults and six children, eight unrelated adults whose backstory was "thrownaway teens squatting in a warehouse."

I never really made it work in day-to-day play, because of the inflexibility of the starting money and the need for lots of different CC, but it was fun to build a hood in which each household was lifted from some fictional source, with the March Girls living next to Tara next to Sherlock Holmes next to Fagin and his boys.